The Two Week Wait Read Free

wailing. Cath can feel him jolting the chair, wriggling, restless, so she scratches
the white antimacassar above his head to get his attention. He peers round the gap between the seats. His face is tear-stained.
    ‘Hello,’ she says, and smiles.
    He ducks away, wary. Shortly he re-emerges, wide-eyed, curious.
    ‘Boo!’ says Cath.
    Again he disappears, and a few seconds later he’s back.
    She hides her face behind her hands, then quickly removes them. ‘Boo!’
    He giggles.
    What a sweetie, Cath thinks.
    So now there’s just landing, then her first skiing lesson, to get through. She’s dreading that. Cath was never good at PE; she was the girl at school who took every opportunity to
skive and sit on the bench, and skiing will require not just aptitude but bravery too.
    Still, having stared at her own mortality in the mirror, nothing frightens her quite as much as it did.
    *  *  *
    It’s no good: Lou can’t rest, and now she can hear birds – at this time of year it must be a robin, laying claim to its territory. Perhaps she doesn’t
miss those trees after all.
    She gets up, impatient, throwing back the sheets. At least with Sofia in a separate bed it’s easier not to wake her.
    She raises the blind a touch to help her see, rummages through her holdall for appropriate clothes, retrieves her trainers from the floor and tiptoes into the bathroom to pull on her tracksuit.
She has to do something with this nervous energy.
    Down the stairs, softly, softly. Her mother is the lightest sleeper; Lou can’t face a dressing-gowned inquisition on top of her own anxiety. She eases back the bolts on the front door,
praying they won’t clank, and then she’s out and on the drive.
    She inhales fresh air deep into her lungs, and, without stretching – the desire to get moving far outweighing any concerns of injury – she’s off down the lane.
    The house is on the outskirts of town. Bare, tangle-twigged hedgerows rise on either side of her. In the distance are gently undulating fields, ploughed and ready for planting. Dawn is
approaching; mist rising from the valley, spectral grey on brown.
    It takes a minute or two for her muscles to warm up and to hit her stride. Ah, that’s better – the rhythm helps calm her, each footfall brings with it increased lucidity, shaking
down thoughts like rice in a jar so they no longer crowd her.
    Sofia must be right. Would she be able to sprint like this if she was really ill? Of course not.
    It’s just, things have been going so well lately. The two of them are looking to buy a place together; her job counselling kids who’ve been excluded from school is easier now
she’s no longer such a novice. It would be typical if something were to trip her up.
    As if to comment on her thoughts, a driver toots, forcing her into the kerb, then overtakes at speed in a glistening Audi.
    What’s the hurry? thinks Lou, annoyed.
    She decides to get off the main road. Hitchin is commuter-belt territory; even this early, people are heading to work.
    She turns left through a kissing gate and onto the common. The riverside path weaves through alder trees and the arching stems of pendulous sedge. In the reed beds frogs will be mating come
early spring, then there will be tadpoles just like the ones she and her sister used to collect in jam jars when they were small. And there in the grazing pasture are the cattle: English Longhorns,
an ancient, placid breed. They raise their heads from the vegetation to gaze at her, bemused.
    She takes her cue, reduces her pace.
    You can run but you can’t flee, she tells herself.
    Two laps later, she’s feeling less agitated. As she jogs out onto the road once more, she has an idea. Yes, why not? She’ll go back that way, through town.
    She slows to a walk as she approaches the entrance, a mark of respect. She briefly wonders if anyone will mind that she’s in her exercise gear, then remembers it’s most unlikely
there will be other visitors at this